But as recently as 2004, the Philadelphia Weekly confidently wrote “there’s little doubt that, thanks in large part to the accident at TMI, there will never be another nuclear power plant built in the U.S.”Why the change?
A glassy-eyed infatuation with technology is part of the answer—call it nuclear religion—and so is bad memory. But the real reason is laziness. Even its advocates acknowledge that, at best, the nuclear option is beset with problems. “The Future of Nuclear Power,” a 2003 M.I.T. report that explicitly set out to promote nukes as a solution to climate change, stated that “the limited prospects for nuclear power today are attributable, ultimately, to four unresolved problems”: high cost; environmental contamination; “security risks stemming from proliferation”; and “unresolved challenges in long-term management of nuclear wastes.” The present pro-nuke argument hinges on theoretical technologies that have yet to be implemented (the Generation III+ reactors), that presuppose a hitherto-unattained level of competence on the part of plant operators and machinery. Conservation is a far more effective—cheap and proven—way for us to fight climate change.
The genesis of the nuclear power industry, which has always been tied to the armaments industry and the Cold War, is not a mystery. Neither is its record. Over the decades they’ve been in use, the plants themselves consistently have faced huge overruns—according to a 1986 DoE report, the 75 American reactors then in operation were projected to cost $45 billion and ended up costing $145 billion; now a single new plant costs in the neighborhood of $5 billion—leak radiation, and produce highly poisonous by-products that no one knows quite what to do with—the only “solution” to date being to ship the stuff far from urban areas, preferably to Native American reservations. Plants typically take a decade to build; they last a mere 30-40 years; and they would never be built but for a maze of special federal tax credits, loan guarantees, risk insurance and outright subsidies. By 2005, by one estimate, the industry had received $77 billion in subsidies.
The nuclear process is one of controlled chaos. At no point is the cycle benign; collection, transport, use and disposal of the fuel involved is at all points hazardous and mishandling can result in catastrophe.
Occasionally an accident occurs that can’t be overlooked, or hidden. The two best known, of course, are the 1986 accident at Chernobyl, which according to official accounts dosed 6.6 million people with massive amounts of radiation, and the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island’s Unit 2—which leaks radiation into the Susquehanna River to this day. Unit 2 never has been cleaned up; it’s still so hot that no one’s been close enough to see exactly what’s inside.
There’s been a significant accident for every day of the year. The near-misses are legion, and rarely make their way into the news: for example, for twenty years workers at Detroit Edison’s Fermi Unit 2 tested their emergency back-up system—a diesel engine to be used to keep the reactor core stable in the event of black-outs—using the wrong answer key. So until the error was discovered in August 2006, the system had never properly been tested. In 2002, workers at the Davis-Besse, Ohio plant discovered a six-inch deep gouge in the nuclear reactor that had grown over six years; according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, it threatened a “loss-of-coolant accident” worse than Three Mile Island. And so on.
We in the United States are used to buying our way out of a “situation”—in this case global warming and high energy costs. Like Wall Street traders who’ve trashed a restaurant, we think we can simply put it on the tab. But what we need to do is clean up our mess. That means drastically reducing energy consumption and changing our lifestyle—not putting us at all risk by investing in technologies which drain scant resources from developing renewable energy.
There’s been a significant accident for every day of the year. The near-misses are legion, and rarely make their way into the news: for example, for twenty years workers at Detroit Edison’s Fermi Unit 2 tested their emergency back-up system—a diesel engine to be used to keep the reactor core stable in the event of black-outs—using the wrong answer key. So until the error was discovered in August 2006, the system had never properly been tested. In 2002, workers at the Davis-Besse, Ohio plant discovered a six-inch deep gouge in the nuclear reactor that had grown over six years; according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, it threatened a “loss-of-coolant accident” worse than Three Mile Island. And so on.
We in the United States are used to buying our way out of a “situation”—in this case global warming and high energy costs. Like Wall Street traders who’ve trashed a restaurant, we think we can simply put it on the tab. But what we need to do is clean up our mess. That means drastically reducing energy consumption and changing our lifestyle—not putting us at all risk by investing in technologies which drain scant resources from developing renewable energy.
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